Feature Teams

What?

A feature team is “is a long-lived,
cross-functional, cross-component
team that completes many end-to-end customer
features—one by one.”
Feature teams are an essential element to scaling up agile development.
Without a feature team structure (but instead, a component team
organization—based on code ownership, combined with a single-function organization—analyst
group, programmer group, testing group, ...) your organization is
likely to
create numerous wastes and sub-optimizations that lead to a sequential
(waterfall, ...)
development cycle. Feature teams structure resolves many of these
wastes but also introduces change and challenges.
Where?

Feature teams have been around in large products for a long time, for
example, within telecom systems (Ericsson) and compiler development
(Microsoft). They
always emerged together with daily builds because frequent builds with
automated testing is a key enabler for getting feature teams to work
well. With the introduction of agile development (and Scrum
specifically) feature teams have gained in popularity because they
focus more on end-customer requirements and shorter cycle times.